An award-winning site must have a layout that's pleasing to the eye with a consistent design across all its pages. It must be well organised, logical and easy-to-navigate.

Establish a colour scheme for your site and keep the number of colours to a minimum.

Don't try to cram your entire site into the first page. Break large areas of text into smaller paragraphs with subheadings to make it easier to read.

Don't use fancy backgrounds that make it hard to read the text. Keep banners to an absolute minimum. If you use music on your site, make sure there is an easy way to turn it off.

Visitors should always know where they are in your site. If you use an image map, or a menu consisting of graphical links, make sure you also have a text version. Navigation should be intuitive and user friendly. You may have to provide more than one menu on a long page or a "Back to Top" link at the bottom of a page. Proof read all your pages, then proof read them again. Check for grammatical errors and spelling mistakes.

Finally, check your HTML using validators such as the W3C HTML Validation Service and Doctor HTML and check your links using a service like NetMechanic or LinkAlarm. If possible, you should also test your site with different screen resolutions, different browsers and different modem speed connections.

This may seem like a lot of work, but if you've submitted your site to search engines, then you've probably done a lot of this work already. And if you haven't, then maybe that's why your search engine rankings are not particularly good!